It’s a beautiful and tender love story… like the ones you can see in the cinema. And precisely, the one who united Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina was born on the film sets. Arrived in France at the age of 17, the actress had started her career as a model, shooting for advertisements, parading on the catwalks, making the cover of prestigious magazines such as SHE. This is how she had been spotted by the director in the making.
While discovering Anna Karina’s incredible gaze in an advertisement for the Palmolive brand, Jean-Luc Godard was still a journalist for the Cinema notebooks. But he was about to retrain, professionally, working on his first film Breathless. This is how he contacted his sweetheart, for the very first time… and she refused to play in this great classic of the New Wave, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, since a scene naked bothered her greatly.
Their professional collaboration finally started later, with The Little Soldier, in 1960, and their romance too. Anna Karina gave the reply to Michel Subor but the one who was captivated by her beauty was Jean-Luc Godard. Crazy in love, the director and his actress married on March 3, 1961. They never had children but could well have started a family, since they lost a baby just before his birth. The actress, poorly treated, became sterile following this incident. Crushed by pain, and despite the many films on which they worked together – six others – the lovebirds ended up giving in and divorced on December 21, 1967.
They didn’t speak to each other for years. Their last contact dates back to around 2000, when Jean-Luc Godard sent a six-page letter to Anna Karina. On September 13, 2022, the filmmaker died at the age of 91. No doubt he found his muse, among the stars, since she had arrived out of breath, before him, at the end of the year 2019…